Navy's New Solution to Bombs: Cook Them With Microwaves

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Navy's New Solution to Bombs: Cook Them With Microwaves

There's no end to what the U.S. military has tried against improvised explosives: mand-made lightning, bomb-handling robots, radio frequency jammers and electronics-frying high electromagnetic pulses. Now, they may have gone one step further, developing explosive-killing microwaves that don't just damage the weapon's circuitry, but are powerful enough to actually detonate a bomb before the enemy does. Think of it like a directional microwave oven. Except munitions are on the menu.

We've all heard that it's no good for pregnant ladies to stand in front of micorwave ovens. But the dangers to unborn fetuses are far from proven. Likewise, there's still a lot of debate in the scientific community about whether the cell phone radiation is harmful or not. In both cases, the radiation is non-ionizing, which means it doesn't damage DNA - like harmful UV rays from the sun do. That's the nature of low energy microwave radiation - for most purposes, it's completely harmless and extremely useful.

But too much of anything can be bad for you, and that's how microwaves become weaponized. At high enough powers, electronics-scrambling microwaves aren't just a threat to radio, television, cell phones, GPS, and radar. Like their high power directed energy cousins, lasers (the first laser was actually a maser), they can destroy anything given enough energy. The edge they have over bomb-blasting lasers - like Boeing's Laser Avenger - is that they can penetrate below the surface, where many of the jury-rigged explosives reside.

There's not much information out there about this new technology. (The picture above is of a Canadian mine "disrupter.") The researchers working on it aren't talking. "Sorry, but due to the nature of the subject I cannot comment on this at all," Dr. Michael Geisselmann, with Texas Tech University's Center for Pulsed Power and Power Electronics, tells Danger Room.

Such a device would no doubt require a truckload (or two) of its own electronic equipment, considering that the Active Denial System, which is a non-lethal microwave device, needs a heavy vehicle to haul it around.

But with improvised bombs killing troops and civilians in Afghanistan in record numbers, the need for a bomb-cooker is greater than ever.*Photo: DRDC*